How a 79-year-old woman stumped Mr. Noobie

Something remarkable happened to me today. A 79-year-old woman asked me a question about her iPad that I couldn’t answer. It was a simple question. Deserving of a simple answer. Or so I thought.

She was asking me how she could get rid of the auto-complete email addresses that popped up when she started typing her friend’s name in the “To” field in the mail application on her iPad.

Only 1 out of 5 is correct

The reason for her request was simple. She had mistyped her friend’s email address four times while trying to send her an email. By the time she got it right, her iPad had stored five email addresses for her friend—one right one and four wrong ones.

And now every time she goes to send an email to her friend, she has to remember all over again which email address is the correct one when she sees the list of five email addresses pop up in the auto-complete box.

At first, I searched the Contacts app on her iPad to see if the bad email addresses were stored there. Nope. Then I logged into her Gmail contacts to see if the problem was there. Nope again.

Even Google couldn’t help

I finally resorted to doing some research on how to delete the bad email address on Google and quickly found dozens of people asking the same question. Unfortunately the answer was the same every time. It can’t be done.

Well, at least not in a way that is acceptable to me. The only solutions mentioned were to factory restore the iPad or jailbreak it.

So as horrible as it felt, I had to tell the 79-year-old woman that it couldn’t be done. Now, to be fair, it’s not really that I couldn’t solve her problem as much as a viable solution wasn’t possible.

If for some reason, I missed a solution, please let me know in a comment below. I know a 79-year-old woman whose day would be made if your solution works.